Strategic Finance articles from April 2002

Strategic Finance archives from April 2002

IMA and the future: a silver bullet. (Letter from the President: Perspectives).(Institute of Management Accountants)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... We all embrace change--except when it affects us. As the IMA seeks to change Education and improve Certification, Participation seems to be left out. Yet the participation part of IMA affects many of our members all during the year, and the...

Real options and strategic decisions. (Strategic Management).
April 1, 2002... In the October 2001 issue of Strategic Finance, an article titled "The Real-Options Approach to Capital Allocation" presented the basics of real-options analysis and showed why it is a widely used approach for valuing capital investments today....

Am I a leader? (Best practices).
April 1, 2002... LEADING IS AN ELUSIVE, MYSTERIOUS ACT. It comprises moments of truth when the leader asks others to entwine their fates for uncertain, unknowable destinies. I'm not speaking about the intellectual process of leading--those familiar...

Boosting employee productivity on a tight budget. (Careers).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... It's no secret that a company must have a motivated and highly productive workforce to be successful. But in today's environment of business reorganizations and downsizings, this can be difficult to achieve--particularly when faced with a...

New developments in performance management. (News).(includes multiple articles)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
April 1, 2002... IS YOUR COMPANY ACHIEVING THE RESULTS IT EXPECTS FROM ITS DEFINED strategies? Is everyone, no matter what level, aware of his or her role in implementing the strategic plan? Performance management has to be integrated throughout a company's...

Are you well traveled? (Streetwise).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... International experience will be a career plus for finance and accounting professionals five years from now. That's what Robert Half International found out in a recent poll of chief financial officers as part of its Next Generation Accountant...

Readers' input.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... ETHICS QUESTIONS Having been watching the Enron hearings fairly closely, I thought it worthwhile to put in my two cents about the Ethics questions in the March issue. 1. Is it reasonable to expect large public corporations to act...

Canadian study shows wide support for corporate responsibility. (Ethics).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... THE CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY MOVEMENT HAS ADVANCED FURTHER IN the U.K. and Canada than in the U.S. Possibly it's because deregulation of markets and the hard-nosed entrepreneurial spirit is more developed here. Perhaps the Enron debacle will...

Bush says "no" to extra money for SEC salaries. (Government).(George W. Bush, Securities and Exchange Commission)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... PRESIDENT BUSH APPARENTLY changed direction and decided against including about $76 million in extra funds in the Securities & Exchange Commission budget for fiscal 2003 for "pay parity." The SEC pays enforcement and legal personnel less than...

The Workers' Manifesto for the New Economy. (Books).
April 1, 2002... * THE INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE AGE HAS caused a greater demand for more talented workers than ever before. In Work 2.0, published by Perseus Publishing, author Bill Jensen throws away the old model of manager/employee relations and puts forth...

Your e-banking future.(Cover Story)
April 1, 2002... It's 2005, and it's a fantastic day for banking. It's 7 a.m. in Stuttgart, and your customer is using his handheld personal computing device to do his weekly banking business while on a car-shopping trip to Europe. He arranges to move...

The case for resource consumption accounting: It can give you a more accurate projection of the resources you need and their costs than traditional methods can. (Cost Management).
April 1, 2002... Resource consumption accounting (RCA) is a comprehensive, fully integrated cost management system. It's an approach to management accounting that leverages the best of the last several decades of developments in the discipline in Europe and the...

The stock options accounting subterfuge: Stock options are employee compensation. Why then aren't these costs recognized on income statements? (Financial Reporting).
April 1, 2002... Everywhere, people are talking about accounting. We can't remember another time when there's been more discourse about the lack of quality and transparency in corporate financial reporting than today. And it isn't only the usual crowd of...

Avoiding revenue management surprises: You need a good system that lets you keep track of multiple revenue streams at a glance. (Cash Management).
April 1, 2002... In the present economy, and particularly in the more volatile high-tech industries, there's a tangible need to maintain a highly nimble organization that can incorporate rapidly evolving business models in order to meet the challenges of...

Using telecommuting to improve the bottom line: the benefits definitely seem to outweigh the costs. (Cash Management).(Statistical Data Included)
April 1, 2002... The first telecommuter on record was a Boston bank president who, in 1877, arranged to have a phone line strung from his office to his home in Somerville, Mass. (1) A century later, in 1973, rocket scientist Jack Nilles had endured Los Angeles...

Making bottom-up ABC work at Reichhold Inc. (Activity-Based Costing).
April 1, 2002... Over the last five years, Reichhold, Inc. has transformed itself from a product-line focused, divisional-structured company into a customer-focused, team-based organization. Reichhold produces chemical adhesives, resins, and polymer systems...

Accelerated evolution. (Tech Forum).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... * WATCHING GRASS GROW IN YOUR BACKYARD might look like a frenetic activity when you compare it to keeping an eye on evolutionary changes. Evolution is invisible because it's gradual in a whole different time scheme. That is, except for...

XBRL enters a new phase. (XBRL).
April 1, 2002... AS WITH MANY DEVELOPMENTS RELATING to the Internet over the last five years, rarely does the initial hype match the reality, especially in the area of software development. Recent developments in the eXtensible Business Reporting Language...

Subjective accounting or fraud? (Trends).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... * INVESTORS ARE PUNISHing stocks and bonds of companies whose financial statements even hint of flawed or opaque numbers. In many cases, the accounting methodologies are complex. They may also be indecipherable. But they're not necessarily...

Sharp Electronics Corp. (Tools of the Trade).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The Linux Open Source operating system is showing up everywhere--on PCs, IBM mainframes, Webpads, clustered supercomputers, in small devices like Tivo, and now in your pocket. Sharp Electronics Corp. previewed its Zaurus SL-5500 PDA at Linux...

Nokia has packed just about everything in its 9290 Communicator. (Tools of the Trade).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Nokia has packed just about everything in its 9290 Communicator. The device combines wireless Web, wireless e-mail, Mobile Office, organizer, multimedia, and phone. With such cross capacity, you can edit a document while talking on speakerphone...

Danger, Inc. (Tools of the Trade).(advertisement)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The Hiptop wireless device from Danger, Inc. is a phone, a camera, and a Web connection. With it you get a full-featured phone, a mini-camera to take photos to send as attachments to your e-mail, an organizer with address book and calendar,...

M-System's DiskOnKey [R]. (Tools of the Trade).(advertisement)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Every now and then a great new idea gets packaged in a truly smart design. A recent example of this rare combination is M-System's DiskOnKey [R]. Closed, it looks like a short (3.2 inches) highlighting pen--pocket clip and all. Open it, and you...

The Digital Album from JOBO Fototechnic, Inc. (Tools of the Trade).(advertisement)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Need to go out into the field to get photographic images of a location or to bring a presentation without lugging a suitcase of projection technology? The Digital Album from JOBO Fototechnic, Inc. is a palm-sized, stand-alone device with a 10GB...